(Raleigh, NC) – The NCSU Libraries is pleased to extend Life’s Little Dramas: Puppets, Proxies, and Spirits, an exhibit conceived and curated by NC State’s Gregg Museum of Art & Design, throughFebruary 28 in the D. H. Hill Gallery. Culled from a recent gift from John C. Henry, along with key works on loan, the exhibit hosts a complete Edwardian-era “Punch and Judy” troupe, Indonesian wayang kulit shadow puppets, marionettes from India, Sri Lanka, and the Czech Republic, and a working replica of a MARS rover robot.

“Life’s Little Dramas presents objects that were purpose-built to be used as puppets and only hints at a phenomenon that is as vast and varied as humanity itself,” says Roger Manley, Director & Chief Curator of the Gregg Museum of Art & Design. “Puppetry has emerged in every inhabited part of the globe as one in the repertoire of activities that have made us human since the dawn of time.”

The NCSU Libraries will also host “Meet the Robots,” a special robotic demonstration and public talk for the whole family, on Wednesday, January 20 at 3:00 p.m. in the second-floor D. H. Hill Library Assembly Room.

Ken Boone, NC State alumnus and founder of KensRobots, will explain and demonstrate the model replica of the MARS rover built by the Triangle Amateur Robotics (TAR) club. The model rover, which features six-wheel drive, four-mode steering, and a transmitting camera, is part of the Life’s Little Dramas exhibit. Attendees will also get to meet the robotic humanoid “Ken” from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Eastern North Carolina Section Humanoid Robotics Project. A optional tour of the exhibit will follow the demonstration.

The Gregg Museum of Art & Design is a collecting museum at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC. The collection includes 34,000 + objects, revealed through exciting exhibitions & programs and is free to all. As part of a research-extensive land-grant university, the Gregg Museum of Art & Design inspires creativity, innovation, and the expression of ideas.

The Libraries now offer IoT hardware, workshops, and project support, as well as a special network in the D.H. Hill Makerspace for networked, reactive devices.

It is now easier to learn about and make automated, “smart” devices on the “Internet of Things” (IoT) at NC State. The Libraries have launched a program of support that includes lending devices such as WiFi-enabled Arduinos, “Getting Started” workshops, project support, and a special network in the D.H. Hill Library Makerspace.

The IoT is the multitude of digital, cloud-capable objects ranging from smart appliances, like automated thermostats and door locks, to embedded transponders that store a patient’s medical data, to field sensors that help gather research data. Globally, an estimated 20 billion objects will be part of the IoT by the end of the decade.

IoT networked devices, including those made with easy-to-learn platforms like Arduino and Particle, collect and report data with other devices, services, and sites. These devices have difficulty accessing the on-campus ncsu, eduroam, and ncsu-guest networks because of their authentication requirements. The NCSU Office of Information Technology has partnered with the NCSU Libraries to eliminate this barrier by launching the MakerspaceIOT Wifi network, which addresses security concerns while enabling users to be on the cutting edge. To do so, the network only allows connections to specific “whitelisted” IoT services or useful sites including Google Drive, Twitter, Dropbox, LittleBits, Temboo, Twilio, and ncsu.edu.

The MakerspaceIOT network is only available in the D.H. Hill Makerspace. More on the network and the Libraries’ support for campus innovation with the IoT can be found at our new dedicated site: www.lib.ncsu.edu/do/iot

The NCSU Libraries Makerspace program encompasses spaces and services at the D.H. Hill and Hunt libraries, available to all NCSU students, faculty, and staff. Visit go.ncsu.edu/make for more information.

Toolkit helps other institutions develop criteria for collecting social media.

Social media platforms are venues for serious and diverse discourse. If only a few institutions are systematically collecting and preserving this critical, but ephemeral, content, this discourse is in danger of being lost.

By harvesting social media data (such as Tweets and Instagram photos), based on tags, accounts, or locations, researchers and cultural heritage professionals are able to develop accurate historical assessments and democratize access to archival contributors, who would otherwise never be represented in the historical record.

To address these issues, the NCSU Libraries recently completed their “New Voices and Fresh Perspectives: Collecting Social Media” initiative. With the support of a North Carolina State Library EZ Innovation grant, the project team created a free web-based documentary toolkit and an open source virtual software collecting environment. This initiative builds on the NCSU Libraries’ leading role in this area of work, established, in part, by its recent development of Lentil—an award-winning open source social media harvesting and presentation tool.

The Shawu150 Project: "Viewing DH from an HBCU,” Desiree Dighton

This toolkit addresses curatorial, legal, and ethical issues associated with archiving harvested social media data. Reflecting what the Libraries has learned while establishing a social media archiving program, the toolkit includes an environmental scan of work being done in the area; documentation of collecting criteria and strategies; a discussion of potential legal and ethical concerns; attempts to address the archival research value of social media; and results from two surveys—one with archival researchers and one with cultural heritage professionals—conducted to determine the value social media data adds to their respective fields. The toolkit includes materials to help other institutions design and document criteria for what they collect and strategies to begin collecting social media. It will serve as the foundation of future explorations of archival best practices and guidelines for handling social media data.

While tools for collecting social media materials are becoming more sophisticated and less expensive, very little has been done to help libraries and others deploy them in thoughtful, effective ways. In an attempt to provide a solution for this, the project team developed the Social Media Combine application that pre-assembles NCSU Libraries’ Lentil Instagram harvester and George Washington University’s Social Feed Manager Twitter harvester, along with the web servers and databases necessary for their use, into a single package that can be deployed (even to desktop and laptop computers) by institutions that do not have access to robust information technology support.

The documentary toolkit, Lentil, and the Social Media Combine are all available online:

As part of the “New Voices” aspect of the initiative, in addition to the toolkit and the Social Media Combine, the Libraries also collected over 1.2 million tweets from over 380,000 Twitter accounts, and 29,000 Instagram photographs and associated metadata records from approximately 18,000 Instagram accounts.

This project is poised to make a meaningful impact on all North Carolinians by promoting the inclusion of a larger and more diverse set of perspectives in the historical records of cultural heritage institutions across, and potentially beyond, the state.

EZ Innovation grants are made possible by the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA), as administered by the State Library of North Carolina—a division of the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources.

Friends of the Library Board of Directors member encourages student philanthropy to the NCSU Libraries

NC State students learn about giving back the Libraries during Penny Wars on the Brickyard.

In an effort to instill in students the spirit of giving, the Alumni Association Student Ambassador Program and the Student Philanthropy Committee are hosting Penny Wars during Homecoming week.

Thirteen spirit teams are competing to raise the most money for a campus entity of their choosing, and this year they selected the NCSU Libraries.

Additionally, Friends of the Library Board of Directors member Wilson White (BS 2003 Engineering) will be matching student donations up to $1,500.

White is Senior Counsel at Google Inc. in Mountain View, California, where he manages public policy outreach and advises on global policy implications.

He earned his B. S. degree, summa cum laude, in Computer Engineering from NC State, where he was a Park Scholar and served on the Student Senate. He earned his J. D. with honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law, where he served on the Editorial Board of the North Carolina Law Review and as President of the Black Law Students Association.

Wilson’s generous gift is a wonderful showing of support both for the NCSU Libraries and for this exciting new student effort. It ensures that the inaugural Penny Wars is a success and that students are educated and excited about giving back to the Libraries.

Caram, a photographer for the Agromeck and Technician while a student at NC State, covered Wolfpack football, soccer, swimming, track & field, and basketball—most notably the 1974 NCAA Championship team that included David Thompson, Monte Towe, Tommy Burelson, and was coached by Norm Sloan.

Caram was also an important documenter of NC State’s campus, including the building of the original Talley Student Center in 1970, ariel photos of the soon-to-be demolished Harrelson Hall, and the Free Expression Tunnel when spray painting was first allowed.

In addition, this collection captures student life in the early 1970s, featuring anti-Vietnam and other political protests and the crowning of the first African American homecoming queen, Mary Porterfield.

A Raleigh native, Caram also photographed local events like The State Fair and North Carolina politicians such as Jesse Helms, Everett Jordan, Nick Galifianakis, Pat Taylor, and Jim Hunt.

Until now, the collection consisted of 18,000 unidentified 35mm negatives, but thanks to Cathy Dorin-Black, University Library Specialist, they have been organized, described, cataloged, and rehoused in acid-free environments. Users may look at the negatives by making an appointment with the Special Collections Research Center. Caram’s digitized black-and-white prints in the University Archive can be viewed on the NCSU Libraries Rare & Unique Digital Collections site.

Before attending NC State, Caram served in the U. S. Air Force. After graduating, he worked as a journalist, publishing several books on the history of North Carolina, two of which discuss the German U-boat wrecks off the coast.

Having lived for many years in Jacksonville, NC, Caram passed away on September 1, 2013 while residing at the Durham VA.

Winning entries will share prizes totaling $1,500 and will be showcased in one of the many visualization spaces throughout the D. H. Hill and Hunt Libraries.

(Raleigh, N.C.) – Through a generous grant from Gale Cengage Learning, the Libraries will offer prizes totaling $1,500 for 3D visualizations, games, animations, or other cre­ative formats that communicate research insights in a visual or interactive manner.

This year’s theme—Food, Clothing, and Shelter— was inspired by the three basic human needs that have served as common, motivating forces throughout human history. The drive to improve our food, clothing, and shelter has influenced the evolution of societies and commu­nities of all types. Colleges and disciplines across NCSU engage in research de­signed to make improvements in these areas.

For this contest, the NCSU Libraries is looking specifically for multimedia projects that explore one or more of these themes within a historical, social, or cultural context.

Last year’s winner was Mary-Katherine Hedrick, for her project “Philologists Who Chase”, a non-linear web gamebook that explores digital media and offers an overview of linguistic subfields alongside biographical information on key philology practitioners in the 1700s.

Like these research projects, this year’s winning entries will be showcased in one of the many visualization spaces throughout the NCSU Libraries.

Any NC State undergraduate or master’s student can enter, and both individual and group projects are eligible. Entrants can fill out the registration form at www.lib.ncsu.edu/multimediacontest, and final projects must be submitted by February 1, 2016.